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Can Legal Service Results Be Guaranteed?

Transcript of the above video:

In this video today, we're going to be discussing legal services and guarantees of performance. Every once in a while less so on legal services, more so on immigration which is a legal service in and of itself but it's sort of a specific subset of legal service, we do get people who ask “Can you guarantee I'm going to get whatever it is that the ultimate goal is?” And the short answer is no and frankly, anybody that provides guaranteed service, you could guarantee.

If you’re a legal service provider, I guess there are legitimate individuals that would maybe guarantee their service, some sort of money back guarantee sort of situation. I can't think of the circumstances in which I would do that and our firm would do that because unfortunately, the world in which we live in is unpredictable. It's hard to say what's going to happen and legal services are no different. It's really not much different from a medical practitioner saying “Oh can you guarantee that this heart surgery is going to go through without a hitch?” Well, no.

There's all kinds of things that play into the complexities in the human body and trying to guarantee an outcome with respect to medicine would be, in a way, somewhat impossible. Legal services are a little different than medicine insofar as perhaps, there may be a greater degree of certainty with respect to certain things. But for the most part, no. A situation can't really be guaranteed. An outcome in a given case of litigation with respect to the courts, it's difficult to say how those types of things are going to come out. Work permit issuance, work authorization, various certifications for corporations here in Thailand, it cannot be foreseen with a hundred percent certainty the way that say, the Board of Investment here, the BOI in Thailand is going to view a given case or is going to view a given petition for BOI benefits or for that matter, a foreign business license. It's just not possible with 100% certainty to guarantee anything with respect to legal services.

So that being said, those who are willing to provide a guarantee, I’m not necessarily saying in and of itself it's a bad thing but I would definitely follow-up with the specifics as regards to guarantee. And the other thing to keep in mind, ask any individual who's offered any individual or firm who’s offering such a guarantee, ask their credentials. That's another thing I find that most people don't really think about over here. I'm an American attorney. I deal with Thai attorneys. I deal with American law in an expatriate context but we have Thai attorneys on staff.

We're happy to provide the credentials of our staff if you wish to engage our services and any other reputable firm, any other firm that has real attorneys, anybody you're dealing with should be able to provide their credentials for the type of undertaking that they're going to be engaged to do and for that reason again, a guarantee might be something of a warning sign with respect to maybe you want to fully vet these individual’s credentials or this firm’s credentials with respect to the service being undertaken because coming out and saying “Oh I guarantee this is what's going to happen,” that to me is a bit of a warning sign that somebody needs to do their due diligence to make certain that the person they're retaining is in fact able to do and qualified to do what they say that they can do.

That being said, it is possible to have a perfectly qualified individual willing to guarantee an outcome and if they're willing to do that on some sort of money-back basis, money-back guarantee basis well, that's a different situation entirely. My only point being with this video, if a guarantee is being offered it probably is a good idea to go ahead and follow up with a fairly significant amount of due diligence to ascertain the qualifications of the individual who is prospectively going to be employed.